Edgy Music Video - 'Shot with a Pen'

I have completed the Music Video that I have been working on, for my son Ryan's new song - "The End of Things". An Edgy video style was used to match his quirky and darker song writing style. We really wanted a feeling of the video being shot with film instead of a video camera. The finished piece that started with my Concept and Story Board a few weeks ago, is exactly what Ryan had envisioned:

[ame="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=03iR9_a5-Lc"]YouTube - Absence of Order : "The End of Things" : Olympus E-PL1[/ame]

BE sure to change the quality Setting from 360p, to 720p to watch in High Definition as shot.

- - - SHOT WITH A PEN - - -

Shot exclusively with the Olympus E-PL1 and 14-42mm kit lens.

Zero budget with video clips being shot in only 2 small rooms and lighting supplied by the 50 watt and 100 watt halogen modeling lights from 2 studio strobes (that's all I had available to me).

Manual focus, and settings of 1250 ISO for all scenes. Aperture Priority exposure was set to minus 1 to 1 1/2 stops depending on the mood I was after. Shutter speed was set to 1/30'th second and colors post processed for contrast and colder tones - for a more film like look. The video was edited using Sony Vegas Movie Studio Platinum 9.0 (inexpensive consumer video editing software).

The E-PL1 cameras Diorama Art Filter was used for the effect on the graveyard scene and closing flower scene. Ryan is a really good performer and high energy with short quick thrashes when playing live on stage - - - and so we tried to incorporate that sensation with the quick sharp movement in clips like some of the lead guitar parts.

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Ryan has being writing and producing songs that are rather dramatic and almost always unconventional (like this song that as no bass guitar and yet his use of the kick drum acts like a bass through it) - since he purchased his Fostex 24 track digital recorder when he was around 14 years old. He started out playing bass guitar, playing his first live gig at 13 - where he stole some of thunder from the other much older band members, with his energy and impressive playing.

His main love is drums and he is an incredible and creative drummer - whether he is producing the sounds with his drum kit, electronic drums or digital drum pad, or writing dashes in Reason with a pencil for the structure. He played guitar and was the singer for years with his band.

He loved the comradery of playing live with his band, but really enjoys his own projects such as this new one, where he can use his own personal work and play and produce everything himself.

Robert, that is very impressive - all shot on the E-PL1 and the quality of the HD, the lighting...the music... Really well done. Your son is a talented musician and singer and he's pretty darn lucky to have you as his cinematographer! That Sony software seems great - the sound quality is excellent, I think and I'm just listening through my MacBook Pro!

I am extremely impressed with this video software for it being a $100 consumer grade application. I have dropped virtually every format of video into it - and it plays it just fine - - - plus will create video with a variety of mismatched formats on the time line - like a clip that made using standard format miniDV and 1080p HD mixed as widescreen output.

For the audio, I was quite surprised at how well this software handles different formats. All I had to work with for assembling the video, up until yesterday - was the first mp3 copy that Ryan sent me a month ago. I decided that I wanted to render out the finished video using an uncompressed WAV format of the song, and so asked him to send one to me. I was surprised when I ended up with an "aif" music file (because he uses Garageband to record on his Mac) to replace the mp3 - - - and upon dragging the aif file onto the timelime - - - it played perfectly. I really didn't expect that, even though I know that more and more PC stuff is handling Mac specific formats. Anyway a nice surpise. For even relatively serious video editing, I really do recommend the Sony Vegas Movie Studio Platinum 9.0 video editing software. One limitation is that I only had 4 video tracks (and 4 audio tracks - less important) to work with - - - but it was better than just one track.

We didn't have too much extra footage to make an outtakes video - but I threw together the few extra pieces that we did have. It is boring as anything, but it may be of some interest to those who wonder how we shot it:

You've gotten my support Robert and I hope you and the "new dog" get your win!

Click to expand...

It would be nice - but I don`t think so at this point the way things are going with the votes - - - but I`ll keep fighting until the end and hope that I can scrape together enough votes to get us in to the part where Olympus has a say. Thanks so much for your support.

I've had a couple of PMs asking if Ryan has a website or album with this song for download or with more songs on it. Ryan doesn't have a website for his music. He also doesn't yet have an album of the songs that are/will be part of this project.

He already has one or two more new songs almost completed for this "Absence of Order" (his name/album/concept) project - - - and he has a couple of songs that he wrote over the last couple of years to get the project going. Those Songs along with Lyrics are/will be stored and can be downloaded on theSixtyOne.com: